Created in his Roxbury, Conn., studio, Mr. Carter’s sculptures are stunning geometrical and fluid forms, often constructed from stainless steel. Highlights from the exhibition include Octacube (1996), an angular silver and copper work that manages to look like a gorgeous piece of space junk (or a deadly weapon) while also revealing the mathematical understanding at its core. Another, Continuous Elliptical Loops (2005), is a smooth, flowing work that evokes fun and joy and silliness. Preliminary sketches and drawings will also be shown, offering a glimpse of Mr. Carter’s process.

In addition to the exhibition, on view through April 29, a retrospective book, Arthur Carter: Sculptures, Paintings and Drawings, will be published in May.

100 Washington Square East, 212-998-6780, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Wednesday; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday; closed Sunday and Monday.

You’d have to go to Rembrandt or Goya to find as pitiless a depiction of the human animal as Pierre Bonnard’s Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror (Self-Portrait) (1939-46), on display in “Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” at the Met.

The old man faces us, naked from the waist up. His bald head, covered in shadow but sharply defined, tilts forward at a niggling angle—as if its weight were increasingly untenable. His skin is translucent and seems barely capable of holding together. Propped within an almost impossibly compressed space, the man gazes intently at nothing in particular. He is, it is clear, distracted by his own mortality.

You’d have to go to Rembrandt or Goya to find as pitiless a depiction of the human animal as Pierre Bonnard’s Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror (Self-Portrait) (1939-46), on display in “Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” at the Met. Is there a modern or contemporary artist who dedicated himself to flesh and bone with as much terrifying candor? German Expressionists are stylistic show-boaters in comparison; Lucian Freud, a cackhanded academician. Alice Neel? Cartoon angst. Jenny Saville? Oh, please.

Portrait of the Artist in the Bathroom Mirror (Self-Portrait) and the less scabrous if equally intense Self-Portrait (1938-40) are, literally speaking, the odd men out at the Met. Nowhere else in the exhibition does Bonnard plumb psyche or physiognomy with as much daunting specificity. But their fairly overt character amplifies Bonnard’s art—or, at least, how it is popularly perceived—in ways that otherwise might prove elusive. Forget the doting painter of cozy domesticity. The French master is something altogether more haunting, idiosyncratic and unclassifiable.

Bonnard (1867-1947) is an artist beloved by many, but not by all. His luminous pictures of fruit baskets, breakfast tables and keening, afternoon light have engendered surprising rancor. Only those “who know nothing about the grave difficulties of art,” wrote art critic Christian Zervos shortly after Bonnard’s death, could admire pictures as “facile and agreeable.” Picasso famously loathed Bonnard’s art: “That’s not painting, what he does.”

In our own time, art historian Linda Nochlin fantasized about “plung[ing] a knife” into a Bonnard canvas for its presumed feminist affronts. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl described Bonnard’s paintings as “masturbatory” and “eye candy.” Writing in the catalog, art historian Jack Flam mentions how Bonnard has been dismissed as “lightweight.” “Bourgeois” is a common epithet.

Better abuse than neglect, but even then, Bonnard suffers. Mr. Flam points to the artist’s fortunes in the academy: “Many people who teach general courses in twentieth-century art simply leave him out.” He traces Bonnard’s “invisibility” primarily to narrow historical strictures. Sure, his innovative work with the Nabis is an important Modernist pit stop. But mostly, Bonnard was a mousy guy given to meditations on place, intimacy and loss. How sexy is that?

The 19th-century trails Bonnard. It can be somewhat startling to realize that he painted up until the time of Abstract Expressionism. But though Bonnard followed upon post-Impressionist logic, he didn’t coast on or rehash its verities. His vision veered into more personal and psychologically charged aesthetic terrain. His deceptively unkempt pictures have their equivalents less in a rock ’em, sock ’em roll call of isms than in, say, Proust’s rueful elaborations on memory. It’s not that Bonnard wasn’t forward-looking. It’s that his vision was encompassing.

What that “more” might be can be hard to finger. Part of the pleasure we derive from Bonnard’s art is its polite refusal to yield its secrets. In The White Tablecloth (1925), bread, fruit and drink are set out on an expansive white tablecloth. A woman in a striped robe stands at the table, her back hunched in stony reverie; Bonnard renders her monumental, sphinxlike. Another woman, altogether less corporeal, glimpses blandly aside. Drama is both overstated and never realized. It’s a masterpiece of narrative elision. Here, but not only here, does Bonnard reveal himself as the 20th-century’s Vermeer.

Painting from memory, Bonnard created patchwork encapsulations of discrete experiences. However abundant or intricate a particular composition is, objects and figures are intransigent and isolated; they’re fixed within their own descriptive parameters. The wiry tension in Lunch (ca. 1932), also known as Breakfast, accrues from tenuously stated relations between a bouquet of flowers, a teapot, a teacup, a shimmering woman and a threatening silhouette. It’s a painting whose lush disharmony is almost unbearable to look at.

Bonnard’s art unsettles, not least because its seductions are irresistible. He brought to the pictures a chromatic density seemingly contradictory to his feathery touch. Color smolders into fruition, gaining in luxuriance and acidity. Bonnard’s brush—skittering, self-effacing and relentless—glances upon objects, but puts them in the service of mood: We recognize things, but the image itself is suffused in a haze of paint. His sometimes infuriating modesty can’t disguise his aesthetic rigor. As a painter, he was, as a friend notes, “one tough son-of-a-bitch.”

“The Late Interiors” continues the conversation about history’s limitations put into motion by the Met’s recent Morandi exhibition. What to do about great artists whose peculiarities prevent them from efficient categorization and Major status? You can celebrate their underdog marginality or you can question the received wisdom. Bonnard may well piss off people because he’s no one’s idea of a revolutionary, but his mastery is irrefutable all the same. He’s just that good. 

“The history of twentieth-century art,” Mr. Flam concludes, “must be reckoned in a different way.” “The Late Interiors” is a welcome step in that reevaluation.

mnaves@observer.com

“Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until April 19.

Or, at least, au courant. Given the laconic expression in Slick (Self-Portrait) (1977), Mr. Hendricks probably views this development with no small measure of bemusement. He knows the convolutions of fashion. Mr.

In an interview with Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the painter Barkley L. Hendricks states that there aren’t “too many contemporary painters I get inspiration from.” Ms. Golden, citing Mr. Hendricks’ “resonance” in the art scene, seems taken aback. He has, after all, benefited from a marketplace that currently smiles upon figurative art. Money, it would seem, has made Mr. Hendricks’ stark brand of portraiture relevant.

Or, at least, au courant. Given the laconic expression in Slick (Self-Portrait) (1977), Mr. Hendricks probably views this development with no small measure of bemusement. He knows the convolutions of fashion. Mr. Hendricks’ art came into its own some 40 years ago and shortly thereafter gained in renown. As someone who once appeared in an advertisement for Dewar’s Scotch, he’s experienced “resonance” firsthand.

Birth of the Cool—the title comes from Miles Davis’ seminal LP—is a selective overview of Mr. Hendricks’ art at the Studio Museum. He’s made still lifes, watercolors, photos, assemblages and (huh?) black light drawings, but it’s portrait paintings for which he’s best known—and rightfully so: They’re assured, taut and true. The work’s in-your-face immediacy is startling, but that’s not all. Each picture unfolds with, yes, cool deliberation.

Mr. Hendricks’ subjects are painted life size, maybe a little larger. They’re rendered with consummate skill: Mr. Hendricks applies paint with deadpan economy. Rigorous attention is paid to likeness, as is conveying the specifics of gesture, attitude, fashion and, if not necessarily character, then type. To a significant extent, raiment takes precedence. Mr. Hendricks isn’t an effusive temperament; nonetheless, you can feel the pleasure he takes in limning wide collars, hot pants or the sloping overcoat in Steve (1976).

Associations peculiar to the period—the late 1960s and early ’70s—abound: Try not thinking Superfly or recalling then-burgeoning Afrocentrism. Politics are alluded to—Icon for My Man Superman (Superman never saved any black people—Bobby Seale) (1969), for instance, or in the oddly beatific visage of a Vietnam-era soldier in FTA (1968). The work evinces an artist peculiarly aware of, and not unamused by, the sociological and historical ramifications in painting black Americans. As catalog essayist Richard J. Powell notes, Mr. Hendricks’ perplexing interest in stereotypes reveals an intellect attuned to devastating ironies.

All the same, Mr. Hendricks is a pure painter. Though his figures are representational, the space in which they are situated is not: Each is surrounded by expanses of flat and uninflected color. The abrupt disconnect between figure and ground recalls Byzantine icons—Lawdy Mama (1969), with its domed format and field of metallic gold, is a blatant reference—and, in the work’s billboardlike punch, Pop Art. Some may want to lump Mr. Hendricks in with Photorealism, but, as an artist trained in working directly from life, mechanical reproduction isn’t an overriding concern. It’s the actual he’s after.

A daunting concentration to detail worthy of Netherlandish painters can be seen in the studio windows reflected in the sunglasses worn by Mr. Hendricks in Slick. But relentless pictorial honing can make him seem an abstract painter. Mr. Hendricks carefully situates each model within the parameters of the canvas; the way they’re juxtaposed within its edges is exacting, as are his subtle elisions in color. In What Goes On (1974), Mr. Hendricks orchestrates white ground, white clothing and brown skin to thrilling effect. Somewhere, Malevich is smiling.

Ms. Golden describes Mr. Hendricks’ achievement as “somewhat timeless.” Somewhat? What a curious aside. Artists play for keeps; their work thrives long after its historical context has come and gone. Mr. Hendricks is wise to this truth. His great loves are timeless through and through: Rembrandt and Caravaggio. In fundamental ways, they’re Mr. Hendricks’ true contemporaries. Birth of the Cool is a long overdue recognition of what is likely to be a timeless achievement. In the short term, it’s wry, pointed and something to see.

“Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool” is at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, until March 15.

Wan and Icky

Fans of Egon Schiele, Joy Division and heroin chic—which is to say, narcissism, gloom, the sleek and sickly—will discover a kindred soul in the South African–born painter Marlene Dumas. Using a palette keyed to gritty runs of black, Ms. Dumas devotes herself to childhood, international politics, childbirth and porno—all of which are rendered wan and icky, chilly and denatured. Ruminations on memory and mortality are undercut by glib theatrics: Ms. Dumas’ brush glances off brutal images as if insouciance were the same as outrage or tissue paper the same as flesh-and-bone.

“Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave” is at MoMA, 11 West 53rd Street, until Feb. 16.

mnaves@observer.com

Distinctions particular to portraiture came to mind when I was looking at Philip Burke’s portrait of Kurt Cobain, frontman for grunge rock band Nirvana and a suicide at the age of 27. It’s a jangled caricature made up of skewed lines, jabbing brush strokes and seemingly incompatible elisions of color. Cobain’s right eye glares at us; the left eye is ratcheted upward and obscured by stringy hair. Compare Mr. Burke’s Cobain to those by Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum. Ms. Peyton paints a symbol of soppy adolescence. Mr. Burke, by contrast, paints the man who wrote a song titled Rape Me.

Mr. Burke is taken less with dreamy narcissism than with stark likeness. He’d better be: A commercial artist out of sync with the ephemeral nature of mass-produced periodicals is begging to have readers gloss over his illustrations on the way to the crossword puzzle. 

Immediacy and impact are Mr. Burke’s stock in trade—the pictures grab and hold; they elaborate as well. Mr. Burke’s double portrait of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards is hilariously concise: Mr. Richards’ shambling integrity and rakish charm are rendered with dead-on acuity. We’re reminded of who the soul of the Rolling Stones really is.

Regular readers know Mr. Burke’s art well: His garish illustrations have been featured on innumerable covers. You’ll recognize not a few when visiting “Philip Burke: Face Nation,” an exhibition on view at Antiquorum gallery and mounted in association with The Observer. A formidable presence in the national media, Mr. Burke’s illustrations have appeared in Rolling Stone, Newsweek, The New Yorker, The Times, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair—the list goes on.

Caricature is inherently pitiless; even the kindest exaggerations intend to reveal, not flatter. Athletes, politicians, rock ’n’ rollers, film stars and the stray supermodel—Mr. Burke paints them as if they were molded from Play-Doh. Every feature—nose, chin, boobs and teeth—turns rubbery, knotted, lumpish or swollen; every attitude is brutally abbreviated. The palette is a queasy mix of cools, warms and oddly congruent clashes in tone. Oils—a famously difficult and time-consuming medium—are applied with speedy resolution. Mr. Burke’s paint-handling slashes and burns with supple precision. Tight deadlines do that to an artist.

You’ll find The Donald here; Princess Di, too. The president-elect beams as the American flag waves behind him. Ray Charles hugs himself, his cavernous laugh accented by explosive dark glasses. Bob Hope eyeballs us with well-honed unctuousness. John Lennon’s face warps and swells, an unnerving distortion that condenses his arrogance and intelligence all the same.  Notwithstanding Mr. Burke’s prevailing acidity, these portraits are relatively benign and sometimes surprising. Mr. Trump comes across as fairly haimish. Who knew?

But, really, the level of pleasure afforded by a caricature increases in direct proportion to its cruelty. Politics brings out the nasty in Mr. Burke. Al Sharpton’s face is subjected to malevolent puckering. The sitting president is a pinheaded cowpoke. And then there’s Hillary Clinton as Queen Elizabeth—a fleshy sack of noblesse oblige rendered in sickly greens, pinks and purples. You’d have to go back to George Grosz to find something quite as poisonous. Our next secretary of state wouldn’t take that as a commendation. Mr. Burke should.

“Philip Burke: Face Nation” is at Antiquorum, 595 Madison Avenue, until Dec. 13.

Scrabbled Pretensions

Eric Fischl, Cindy Sherman, Sandro Chia and Terry Winters—you can’t throw a rock in Chelsea without hitting a 1980s art star. Mr. Winters fares the best, combining signature biomorphic shapes with schematic structures gleaned from (don’t ask) “knot theory.” The paintings sag under the artist’s scrabbled pretensions and a continuing over-reliance on Philip Guston and Cy Twombly, but there’s a difference: At long last, Mr. Winters understands color. Perfumey creams, pinks, grays and blues quaver, trickle and delicately claim their pictorial turf, endowing the pictures with chromatic amplitude.

“Terry Winters: Knotted Graphs” is at Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street, until Jan. 24.

Endearing Naïveté

Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) (2008), a video projection by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, transforms MoMA’s mezzanine into a watery Edenesque parable. A cinematic tumble of luridly colored flora, fauna, nudes and discarded soda cans offer testimony to nature’s beneficence and its ruin. As an environmentalist tract, Ms. Rist’s tone-poem installation is blessedly light of touch—its moralism is spectacular, not profound. A huge circular sofa, throw pillows and shag carpeting in the gallery provide a comfy spot to marvel at Ms. Rist’s endearing naïveté.

Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) is at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, until Feb. 2.

Tenderly Distressed

Maryam Amiryani’s still-life paintings are gems of pictorial economy. Small in scale and ineffably concentrated, they contain anonymous surfaces upon which are placed one or two crisply delineated objects—a toy zebra, a paper hat or poppies. The colors are few, rich and clean; the mood intimate bordering on otherworldly. A spare strain of symbolism infiltrates Ms. Amiryani’s art, but it’s her tenderly distressed surfaces that entrance.

“Maryam Amiryani” is at George Billis Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, until Dec. 20.

mnaves@observer.com 

You’ll see Calder invent the mobile at roughly the midpoint of “Alexander Calder: The Paris Years; 1926-1933,” an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was a transformative moment prompted by a move to Paris. Upon arriving in 1926, Calder delighted in the city’s convivial atmosphere and often saucy entertainment—the performer Josephine Baker was a favorite. Calder ingratiated himself with luminaries like Miró, Léger, Man Ray, André Kertész and Mondrian.

A trip to the Mondrian’s studio was life-changing: “This single visit gave me a shock … I wanted to paint and work in the abstract.” The resulting paintings are humdrum reiterations of neo-Suprematist principle. But then there are the sculptures: looping tabletop armatures, all sprung wire, wooden spheres, motors and balance—always that delicately calibrated balance. The excitement inspired by Mondrian is palpable. Calder’s light bulb goes off; our hearts start beating faster.

And then it’s downhill from there—or so “The Paris Years” suggests. It isn’t because the gravity-challenged pieces in the final gallery disappoint. It’s because the work leading up to the mobiles evinces a facility that’s almost alarmingly preternatural. When an artist makes a medium his own—discovering its peculiarities, possibilities and how it becomes congruent with individuality—it’s a revelatory moment. But wire for Calder? It’s as if it had forever been waiting for him. There’s no revelation here—just magic gleaned from the ether.

“The Paris Years” begins with a dizzy and seemingly insurmountable introduction: A stellar array of portrait heads. Friends, artists, celebrities and Herbert Hoover—they’re caricatures given uncanny dimension. “Drawing in space” is a shopworn Modernist trope typically applied to Constructivist sculpture, but Calder’s wire caricatures are the real deal. Jennifer Tipton, whose regular gig is lighting for the theater, has done a superb job emphasizing this aspect of Calder’s art. The portraits don’t cast shadows; they reveal facets—often more profound than we might expect from this artist—that otherwise might have remained unknown.

The remarkable thing about Calder’s wire pieces is how they address volume.  These are sculptures in the round. They encompass and encapsulate space with breathtaking speed and ease: Jimmy Durante’s shnoz, Josephine Baker’s breasts, acrobats in midair, a pot-bellied bobby and a monkey-limbed John D. Rockefeller playing golf are all bodies. Calder may have employed diagrammatic means, but he made the insubstantial monumental. In not altogether surprising ways, the work recalls that of Rodin.

Gesture, too, is unerringly put into place: the forward trot of The Hostess (1928) betrays her snobbery. But notwithstanding its softball acidity, the sculpture is indicative of Calder’s defining graces: Sociability and showbiz. Playing to the audience powered his fancies and his sense of invention. Calder delighted in the circus—yes, the Whitney’s mainstay Calder’s Circus (1926-31) is here—not least because it was a metaphor for his own temperament, strengths and vision. He thrived on applause.

Calder made toys for children, but all of his work—or, rather, his best work—are toys. The biggest difference between the early wire sculptures and the mobiles-to-come is that the latter lent themselves to public display; the former, to intimacy. “Hands-on” is the key to Calder’s winning and ineluctable genius. “The Paris Years” makes that distinction abundantly and delightfully clear.

“Alexander Calder: The Paris Years; 1926-1933” is at the Whitney Museum of American Art,  945 Madison Avenue, until Feb. 15.

Uncanny Concision

The Japanese tradition of shaping bamboo for baskets and floral displays dates back a thousand years, but it’s become a freestanding sculptural medium for contemporary artists. “New Bamboo” includes 23 artists, and while each possesses immaculate skill, not a few mistake fussiness for intricacy and self-aggrandizement for expertise. At their most astonishing—Nagakuri Ken’ichi’s unnerving effigies or Tanabe Mitsuko’s comical and primordial biomorphs—the artists render bamboo fluid and tensile, impossibly delicate. Natural forces—wind, sun, breathing and, er, UFOs—are embodied with uncanny concision.

“New Bamboo: Contemporary Japanese Masters” at the Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street, until Jan. 11, 2009.

Rueful Irony

Native American culture is the basis of “Identity by Design,” and ritual the fulcrum, but sensuality is its pleasure. Crafted for ceremonies specific to women, the dresses range in design and craft from ascetic to spectacular to gaudy—a little bit of rhinestone goes a long way. Subtle transitions between materials—fire-polished beads, cowrie shells, elk teeth and the irresistible nubble of animal hides—beg for our touch. A Lakota dress accented by tattered American flags begs for irony almost too rueful to consider.

“Identity By Design: Tradition, Change and Celebration in Native Women’s Dresses” at the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, One Bowling Green, until September 2009.

Thrilling Anyway

Masterworks by Botticelli, Titian, Giorgione, Lorenzo Lotto, Tintoretto and Ghirlandaio—O.K., “Portrait of a Young Man” and “Portrait of a Young Woman” (ca. 1490) are just attributions, but who cares? They’re thrilling all the same, and are among the many reasons to visit “Art and Love in Renaissance Italy.”  Glassware, maiolica, sculpture and jewelry offer additional testimony to perennial commemorations of betrothal, marriage and birth. Don’t forget sex—the ridiculously vulgar The Triumph of the Phallus is an ornate priapic homage that could’ve been lifted from Monty Python.

“Art and Love in Renaissance Italy” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until Feb. 16.

mnaves@observer.com 

When Mr. de Montebello announced his retirement almost a year ago, many New Yorkers were taken aback. The museum’s public face and its unmistakable voice (who hasn’t heard those dulcet tones emanating from the nearest audio guide?), Mr. de Montebello was the museum’s eighth and longest-serving director. He hasn’t been a fixture of the city’s life so much as one of its linchpins. Under Mr. de Montebello’s guidance, our greatest museum became even more indispensable.

Not least because of respect paid to the public. “Elitism” is a dirty word redolent of sniffy aristocrats, but Mr. de Montebello has proven that it isn’t necessarily the same thing as snobbery. By advocating for the highest standards, he placed faith in the acumen and ability of that many-headed monster, the general audience. This outlook is starry-eyed, perhaps, but better naïveness than rank condescension. Besides, Mr. de Montebello has been vindicated. Look at the crowds: They want to see the best. In his own erudite way, Mr. de Montebello is a populist.

The Met acquires an object after a variety of experts—curators, conservators, librarians and scientists—discuss and debate its historical and artistic merits. But Mr. de Montebello was the final word—or so it’s said. “My-way-or-the-highway” betrays not a little arrogance; there’s no doubting Mr. de Montebello must have frustrated and infuriated colleagues. But quality, not appeasing, was the goal. Do I remember correctly Mr. de Montebello stating that collecting used condoms wasn’t in the museum’s mission statement? He took his job seriously.

EIGHTY-FOUR THOUSAND objects entered the collection during Mr. de Montebello’s tenure. There are bound to be a fair share of clunkers—how could there not be? All the same, the work on display—around 300 or so pieces—is probably fairly skimpy in terms of the good stuff. You just know the riches go deeper than that. Helen C. Evans, curator of Byzantine art, must have exercised considerable diplomatic skill in coordinating the 17 curatorial departments when organizing the exhibition.

The curators had free reign, but Mr. de Montebello made a request: The exhibition should be mounted in a cross-cultural and ahistorical manner. Five thousand years of art—why not mix-and-match Mesopotamian devils, Jasper Johns, sandstone Buddhas, a Kongo power figure, Islamic miniatures and Peter Paul Rubens’ busty wife? Commonalities in aesthetic and functional purpose are gently emphasized, not least as they apply to art’s ability to encapsulate spiritual longing and solace. (Mr. de Montebello has spoken movingly about the profound feelings engendered by Duccio’s “Madonna and Child.”)

Juxtapositions of time, style and place, often extreme and never denied, are rendered fluid. Credit Jeff Daly, the senior design adviser, for a beautifully nuanced installation—he hasn’t done the impossible; he’s made the possible revelatory. But consider what he’s working with: a collection guided by a man whose discernment, intelligence and eye have led him to a fairly unfashionable conclusion: Art is the embodiment of humankind’s noblest impulses. Mr. de Montebello is an optimist. That’s but one reason “Three Decades of Acquisitions” sings.

“The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until Feb. 1, 2009.

Daunting Intensity

Political artist Sue Coe aims her latest critique at cruelty inflicted on elephants. Most of the pictures focus on early 20th-century circuses replete with dicey stagehands, a clammy P. T. Barnum and Thomas Edison—the great inventor electrocuted an elephant as a publicity stunt. A nitpicky hand at oils muffles Ms. Coe’s rancor, but the drawings—fiery admixtures of gouache, graphite, watercolor and collage—embody it with daunting intensity.

“Elephants We Must Never Forget: New Paintings, Drawings and Prints by Sue Coe” at Galerie St. Etienne, 24 West 57th Street, until Dec. 20.

Deadening Literalism

Alfred Kubin’s black-and-white drawings, nightmarish dreamscapes enveloped within gloomy chiaroscuro, recall Goya’s Los Caprichos and Redon’s mystical reveries, but Salvador Dali is the better comparison. Lacking moral indignation or haunting romanticism, the Austrian loner illustrated his monsters, hobgoblins and “slaughter festivities” with deadening literalism and stilted authority. The drawings aren’t hallucinations given heft, but melodramatic inventories of Freudian portent.

“Alfred Kubin: Drawings, 1897-1909” at the Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, until Jan. 26.

mnaves@observer.com

Hype knows no bounds, but the Ramírez find is a pretty big deal. Long known to aficionados of outsider art, his drawings were the subject of a retrospective last year at the American Folk Art Museum. Ramírez’s vertiginous tableaux of caballeros, animals and preternatural, zooming trains prompted far-reaching accolades. The Times claimed him as “one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.” Watch your back, Matisse.

Ramírez emigrated from Mexico to the United States in 1925. Looking for jobs in Northern California, he worked in the mines and for the railroad, but not for long. He was arrested and hospitalized for “catatonic” behavior. Ramírez spent the remaining 32 years of his life shuttling between institutions, eventually ending up in DeWitt State Hospital. Ramírez hardly spoke while institutionalized. He began to draw during the mid-1930s.

It wasn’t until mid-century that Ramírez’s art began to gain notice. Dr. Tarmo Pasto, a professor of psychology and art, saw the drawings and made Ramírez the center of a study on the relationship between creativity and mental illness. Pasto supplied Ramírez with drawing materials, storage space and public exposure. He acquired 300 pieces. How aware was Ramírez when he gave the drawings away? How ethical was Pasto in accepting them?

However fuzzy the circumstances, there’s no doubting the good doctor’s gift to history; without it, Ramírez’s astonishing achievement would have been lost. Or maybe not. Taking Antiques Roadshow as inspiration—no, really, she did—Brooke Davis Anderson, organizer of the Folk Art Museum retrospective, placed notices for Ramírez drawings in Northern California newspapers. She received an e-mail that was, as Ms. Anderson breathlessly describes it, “a curator’s dream come true.”

The message was from Peggy Dunievitz, daughter-in-law of the late Dr. Max Dunievitz, and Peggy’s daughter-in-law, Julia. Dr. Dunievitz worked at DeWitt, picking up where Pasto left off. He bought supplies for Ramírez and, given his ability to speak Spanish, conceivably had conversations with him. Dunievitz collected drawings; Peggy thought the family had around 50. Stored in the garage, packed in rose boxes and placed on top of the fridge, there were almost three times as many. A generous sampling of them are currently on display at the Folk Art Museum and Ricco/Maresca Gallery.

RAMIREZ'S ART IS unrelentingly intense and limited by forbidding narrowness. Psychological claustrophobia is its inescapable strength and its defining liability: The work deepens, but remains static. Still, Ramírez’s pictures are wonders of iconography and pictorial invention. Evenly distributed linear patterning, bulging and scalloped, radiates and flexes with taut, manic purpose. Hieroglyphic figures are trapped within the resulting up-ended and theatrical settings. Is that the Virgin Mary, the Statue of Liberty or an Aztec priest? Specificity is less important than an air of eternal isolation.

Necessity largely determined Ramírez’s materials. Chewed newspaper, tongue depressors for ruling straight lines, matches wetted with saliva, and paste made from potatoes were his tools. They’re employed with rough-hewn certainty. The pictures are crumpled—the result, most likely, of negligence both on the part of the artist and a host of caretakers. But Ramírez’s imagery is bolstered, not obscured, by stuff, however grubby or worn. Ramírez’s clubby and insistent line guarantees the imagery’s haunting integrity.

The most unsettling Ramírez drawings are devoted to rows upon rows of tunnels. Unpeopled trains travel through them with ghostly portent. Often the tunnels are empty: deep and airless archways. In several pieces, staggered sheets of paper have been collaged together, making for expansive and scary vistas. You feel the inescapable burden of Ramírez’s constricted psyche. This is true of many outsider artists, but not all of them are cut from the same untutored cloth. Ramírez is something rare and special: His world is real and he makes us part of it.

“Martin Ramírez: The Last Works” is at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, until Nov. 29; and at the American Folk Art Museum, 45 West 53rd Street, until April 12.

Light Fare

“The Seduction of Light: Ammi Phillips/Mark Rothko Compositions in Pink, Green and Red,” also at the American Folk Art Museum, attempts to locate commonalities between the 19th-century folk painter Ammi Phillips and Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko. It’s a stretch—palette and “soul-thirsting” aren’t flexible enough to accommodate it. As it is, Phillips’ crisp and brilliantly mannered portraits make a hash of Rothko’s dour pretensions. The irresistibly mischievous dog skulking in several Phillips canvases all but makes you forget the fuzzy rectangles nearby.

Until March 29.

Chilly Affectation

Garish, slack and hapless, Elizabeth Peyton’s paeans to adolescence, celebrity and Kurt Cobain would shame the marginalia in a high-school notebook. Would that she were as starry-eyed and precocious. Instead, fey portraits and louche mise-en-scène reveal an artist incapable of differentiating teendom’s enthusiasms from their wan approximation. An artist who can’t paint, draw or trace, Ms. Peyton fails to redeem her chilly affectations.

“Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton” is at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, 235 Bowery, until Jan. 11.

Dull Dazzle

Beatriz Milhazes’ abstractions are beautiful without being seductive, over the top but not swoon-inducing. Layering stylistic motifs gleaned from Islamic art, modernist painter Sonia Delaunay and a hothouse palette influenced by her native Brazil, Ms. Milhazes contrives radiating fields of pattern—ornamental fireworks. The craft is appealingly secondhand—Ms. Milhazes paints on plastic sheeting and transfers the results onto canvas, but the work’s dazzle is routine and somewhat dulling.

“Beatriz Milhazes” is at James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26th Street, until Nov. 15.

mnaves@observer.com

A protégé of Andy Warhol, Mr. LaChapelle gained renown as a celebrity photographer. His sleek and porno-wise pictures have appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair and Interview, and have featured, among others, Naomi Campbell, Britney Spears and Jocelyne Wildenstein. Garish display is Mr. LaChapelle’s specialty, and it’s there to see in his expansive vistas of wounded soldiers, Jesus Christ, pigs fucking, swipes at imperialism, and beautiful young people in various states of undress.

Photography is put in the service of three-dimensional dioramas—oversize pop-up books. The craft is shoddy: Mr. LaChapelle’s pictures adhere to poorly cut silhouettes of cardboard—no, they’re not “so bad they’re good”—and the moving carousel in Holy War was out of service the day I attended. The sheep present in the same work did bleat, which is something, I suppose. The assembled photos of crumpled cars made me pine for Green Car Crash (1963)—at least Warhol’s deadpan whimsy had a point.

Mr. LaChapelle is a purposefully mainstream enfant terrible. Andres Serrano, whose exhibition at Yvon Lambert Gallery closed last week, had notoriety thrust upon him, though he certainly had a hand in engineering it. Piss Christ (1987) famously earned the ire of Congressman Jesse Helms, and brought scandal to the National Endowment for the Arts, which had awarded the artist a $15,000 grant. The controversy surrounding the photo of a crucifix submerged in urine guaranteed Mr. Serrano a place in the history books.

But outrage has a short shelf life. Almost 20 years after the fact, Mr. Serrano’s recent series, Shit, is a has-been’s attempt to rekindle his status as a champion of artistic freedom. With subjects hoarded from animals, the artist himself and his mother, these large-scale photographs of squishy, craggy and dried-out turds aren’t particularly provocative—they’re high-priced and oh-so-tired novelties. I mean, the New York Post wrote a puff piece on Mr. Serrano and his shit. How shocking can it be?

CATHERINE OPIE'S PHOTOS of mustachioed lesbians, transsexuals, S&M practitioners, piercings and tattoos—her self-described “royal family”—are the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim. They offer yet another study of how in-your-face reputation inevitably turns into play-it-safe art. Ms. Opie appears in two self-portraits: one, with a childlike drawing sliced into her back; in another, she’s pierced with a daunting number of what look to be hypodermic needles. The 16th-century painter Hans Holbein is listed as an influence, but Robert Mapplethorpe is closer to the truth.

Not least because Ms. Opie, after her initial splash, became expert in creating handsome pictures that Alfred Stieglitz would’ve smiled upon. Architecture is the new leitmotif, as is black and white, a palette whose silvery tonalities shows up her previous coloristic sumptuousness as cloying and decorative. Freeway overpasses, Beverly Hills mansions, strip malls, “Bar. B. Q. Pit—100% Natural Juice” and a prophetically deserted Wall Street—they don’t quite live up to the catalog’s claim of embodying “the utopian notion of difference,” but they are fairly adept exercises in abstraction. As such, they’re good to look at. But don’t kid yourself: Were the photos by anyone else, they’d be dismissed as bland and derivative.

GRACEFULLY SLIPPING UNDER the radar is Alessandra Sanguinetti, whose photos are on display at Yossi Milo Gallery. Collectively titled The Life That Came, the pictures continue an earlier series devoted to Guillermina and Belinda, cousins growing up in rural Argentina. Ms. Sanguinetti established a strong bond with the girls: The photos capture preadolescence with tender insight. Belinda is thin and pretty; Guillermina is chubby—and the camera loves her. Their relationship is suffused with uncanny clarity and magic.

In the new work, the advent of womanhood seems as forlorn as the farmhouse’s crumbling environs and surrounding landscape. Mindful of Ms. Sanguinetti’s presence, the teenagers, already self-conscious, are guarded. The artist is a gentle voyeur rather than a participant. Diffuse natural light bathes Belinda as she kisses her newborn baby; Guillermina lies on her bed with an awkward sense of budding sexuality. Intimacy gives way to narrative, and this diminishment dulls Ms. Sanguinetti’s novelistic vignettes. Still, this is a remarkable achievement—dreamlike, sure and deeply humane.

“David LaChapelle: Auguries of Innocence” is at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 544 West 26th Street, until Oct. 24; “Catherine Opie: American Photographer” is at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, until Jan. 7; and “Alessandra Sanguinetti: The Life That Came” is at Yossi Milo Gallery, 525 West 25th Street, until Oct. 18.

mnaves@observer.com.

Over the past few years, a handful of almost surreptitious gallery exhibitions were devoted to the Italian modernist. The pickin’s were slim—10 paintings in each venue, if that—but they were enough to set gallery-goers drifting out in a haze of pleasurable disbelief. Why wasn’t this great—hell, sublime—painter getting the widespread attention he deserves?

The answer isn’t hard to pin down. Morandi painted tenderly choreographed arrays of bottles and boxes and the stray landscape—that’s about it. The pictures aren’t sexy. Dusty with isolation, Morandi’s homely dioramas are redolent of studio quietude. A Morandi doesn’t demand attention; it beckons for intimacy.

Working in collaboration with the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (MAMbo), the Met show is the first complete Morandi exhibition organized in the United States. It’s installed in the lower level of the Robert Lehman Wing, a space whose physical remove and hushed ambience are suited to the artist’s restraint. The entirety of the oeuvre is touched upon with uncommon deliberation. After traversing over a hundred pieces, you want more. The Met has done up Morandi right.

Born in Bologna, Morandi studied at his hometown’s Academy of Fine Arts (his interest in art having been grudgingly capitulated to by his businessman father). The experience was dispiriting: The school, Morandi wrote, “served only to plunge me into a state of deep unrest.” Skepticism about art as an academic discipline stayed with Morandi even as he returned to the Academy some 20 years later to teach etching. As an instructor, he preferred teaching technical procedures over aesthetics.

PAINTING, NOT POLEMIC, drove Morandi. After an infatuation with Futurism’s radical bromides, Morandi looked for inspiration in less flashy precedents: Chardin, Seurat, Corot, Cézanne. His paintings don’t play into the standard Modernist narrative. Stylistic innovation and the spotlight didn’t interest him. “In the eyes of the Grand Inquisitors of Italian art”—he means the art establishment—“I remained but a provincial.” Obscurity suited Morandi fine.

Morandi’s fascination with natura morta was loving, remorseless and, in the end, inexorable. Hindsight reveals as much in early experiments with Cézanne-esque facture and Cubism, but it isn’t until the mid- to late teens that Morandi’s signature motif gains real emphasis. You can feel it in the elongated vessels in a Picasso-influenced canvas. But it was Surrealism or, rather, its Italian offshoot, pittura metafísica, that made Morandi’s imagery concrete and contributed the profound heft he brought to oil paint.

Metaphysical painting involved itself less with Freudian theory than with unsettling nostalgia. Giorgio de Chirico was its best known and definitive practitioner. His dreamscapes of isolated plazas, zooming architecture and longing for Renaissance clarity were spartan in tone, if not always in composition. Morandi’s forays into this ascetic realm were even more distilled—to the point where metaphysics was almost beside the point.

De Chirico is in the mix in the handful of Morandi’s metaphysical paintings on display. Set on anonymous surfaces, a selective array of things are stringently orchestrated—a fruit dish, a pipe, cylinders and, the only blatantly “surrealist” object, a bisected mannequin’s head. Items float inside boxes with unearthly poise, the boxes themselves denatured and transparent. The best of the lot, a canvas from 1919, is passive-aggressive: The still life confronts us with dreadful quietude.

An air of mystery, however understated, continued to filter through Morandi’s paintings, as did an unrelenting concentration on placement. Portent became less important than softly stated anxiety over representation. “Nothing is more abstract than what we actually see,” Morandi famously said. The harder Morandi looked at stuff on his table, the more elusive it was. The bristling trail left by his brush became increasingly forthright, agitated and meditative. Morandi’s search is palpable; the paintings question themselves right in front of our eyes.

Morandi’s palette is grayed and dusky—ochres, burnished browns, smoky off-whites and, in a lone hedonistic gesture, a pinkish and orange cream in a trio of canvases from 1956. His tabletops are almost pro-forma—a horizon that, at rare moments, curves or slopes. Morandi’s objects nudge each other, as though trying to situate themselves with some fleeting sense of logic. Elisions of space, gravity and viewpoint create a just barely discernible electricity. In an odd way, you feel the paintings before you see them.

The artist himself appears in two rare self-portraits. Striking the same pose in each—Morandi, with slumped shoulders and palette in hand, sits despondently in thought. One painting is monumental, heavy and solid—Morandi the Mountain. The other is intangible, almost ghostlike; in it, description yields to mood and specificity to abstraction. Both paintings are about the impossibility of grabbing hold of a moment. Their tenacious doubt is unshakable, and a gift.

“Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until Dec. 14.

mnaves@observer.com.

Brigid Berlin’s exhibition of needle-point pillows, at John McWhinnie@Glenn Horowitz Bookseller (Oct. 21 to Nov. 22), is bound to be among the most entertaining. Daughter of Richard E. Berlin (chairman of the Hearst empire in its glory years) Brigid grew up among royalty and privilege. Groomed for Fifth Avenue respectability, Ms. Berlin opted instead for the Chelsea Hotel and Andy Warhol’s cadre of misfits.

It’s less well known that Ms. Berlin is (in the estimation of Art in America) “a conceptual artist of no mean stature.” Her pillows, inscribed with headlines from the New York Post—Ms. Berlin reads it religiously—mix and match domesticity and tabloid hyperbole to caustic and often hilarious effect. Jim McGreevey makes an appearance in Ms. Berlin’s art, as do Saddam Hussein, Keith Richards, and Brooke Astor.

Brazil’s Beatriz Milhazes will exhibit new paintings at James Cohan Gallery (Oct. 10 to Oct. 15). Floral motifs, dotted mandalas, ornate arabesques, and steadying blocks of geometry float and spin within abraded fields of crisp and overripe color. Marked by decorative excess, headlong momentum, and more rigor than you might think, Ms. Milhazes’ art is almost too much of a good thing. That’s the point.

Exit Art marches forward with “Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now” (Sept. 20 to Nov. 22). Organized by the gallery’s ominous-sounding “curatorial incubator,” the exhibition will sprawl: Hundreds of posters, photos, films, audio clips, and assorted ephemera document the struggles for civil rights, AIDS, democracy in China, apartheid, women’s rights, and other good fights too numerous to mention.

Politics are also at the center of “Invasion 68 Prague” (through Oct. 30), a show of Josef Koudelka’s large-scale photographs at Aperture Gallery. A witness to the Soviet-led invasion of Prague, Mr. Koudelka’s iconic photographs capture the resulting indignation, anger, confusion, and disbelief. Knowing full well the ramifications of his unsparing documentation, Mr. Koudelka didn’t claim authorship of the photos until almost 20 years later.

Peter Blum Gallery does history a favor by devoting an exhibition (Oct. 19 to Sept. 1) to Wendingen, an avant-garde journal published by Architectura et Amicitia, an architecture association based in Amsterdam. Appearing monthly from 1918 to 1932, the publication focused on sculpture, dance, theatrical design, and Frank Lloyd Wright (who was the subject of seven issues). Gustav Klimt contributed to Wendingen’s pages, as did Josef Hoffmann and El Lissitzky.

Mexican outsider artist Martín Ramírez (1885-1963) has been hyped as “simply one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.” Certainly, there’s no gainsaying how swiftly his vertiginous dioramas of trains, cowboys, and manic patterning blur the distinction between high and folk art. A group of Ramirez drawings recently discovered in a California garage (an Antiques Roadshow dream come true!) will appear at Ricco Maresca (Oct. 2 to Nov. 29).

Emily Nelligan took up charcoal because oil paint was too expensive—bad for her, good for the art of drawing. Working on a small island off the coast of Maine, Ms. Nelligan smudges, smears, and erases charcoal dust into dense and velvety landscapes. Transfixed by the fugitive nature of atmosphere and light, she responds to sea, sky, and land with moody, intuitive grace. Her drawings will be exhibited along with those of her husband, Marvin Bileck, at Alexandre Gallery (Nov. 20 to Dec. 27).

OTHER NOTEWORTHY EXHIBITIONS include Mark Wagner’s meticulous collages at Pavel Zoubok Gallery (through Oct. 4). Cut, pasted, and reconfigured from dollar bills, the pieces are tours de force of wit, astonishing craft, and neo-Dadaist whimsy.

On the Lower East Side, Jonathan Greene Gallery opens its doors with sculptor Nathan Skiles (through Oct. 5), whose bizarre and brainy amalgams of Styrofoam, cardboard, and felt offer meditations on our “convoluted culture.” Over in Brooklyn, Doug Parry’s suite of autobiographical paintings, The Thirteen Stages of the Double-Cross, at Art 101 Gallery (Sept. 12 to Oct. 5), make unsettling comedy from clowns, cruelty, and Freudian portent.

You might detect traces of porn under Cecily Brown’s flurries of oil paint on display at Gagosian’s Chelsea Branch (Sept. 20 to Oct. 25). Whether that redeems her umpteenth-generation Abstract Expressionism will depend on whether you like your titillation watered down or straight up.

mnaves@observer.com